The Heart of Suffering and Emptiness
El Corazón del Sufrimiento y la Vacuidad
A question about the meaning of emptiness leads into a wide-ranging exploration of whether direct experience can be self-deception, why spiritual work initially deepens suffering rather than relieving it, and how pain transforms when resistance falls away.
The Heart of Suffering and Emptiness
A question about the meaning of emptiness leads into a wide-ranging exploration of whether direct experience can be self-deception, why spiritual work initially deepens suffering rather than relieving it, and how pain transforms when resistance falls away.
You mentioned emptiness. Can you elaborate a bit more? Is it emptiness in the Buddhist sense, where nothing exists on its own, where nothing is independent and cannot be there without dependency on other things?
You're talking about dependent origination in Buddhism. It's related. I'm using the word in a slightly more abstract, poetic sense, but it's also very literal. There is no better way to describe direct experience than saying it is empty and full at the same time.
Everything we see seems to be like there is something there. There is, and there isn't. It's very difficult to describe. It has something to do with what you mentioned: no thing. The essence of it is empty.
The ocean and the waves
It is also related to dependent origination. What we experience as our body, words in a conversation, a person, ourselves: all of that, as a metaphor, you could think of as waves in the ocean. Everything we can know, everything that is experienced through perception, sensation, sound, sight, thought, emotion, all of it is phenomenological. All of it is waves.
And these waves arise in an ocean, but in this metaphor the ocean is not water. In experience, the ocean is emptiness. You could also say consciousness, or beingness. But it's not that there is consciousness and then phenomena appearing within it. It's like the ocean. The waves don't appear in the ocean. They are the ocean.
That seems to transcend space and time.
It contains space and time. Space and time are waves in the ocean, or you could say they are the mechanics, the system through which the waves move. Still made of the ocean. If the ocean becomes still, space and time disappear. The waves disappear.
Just to be clear, this is something that can happen experientially. You can know directly the answer to the question of whether there is something without experience. For example: how do you know you exist?
Because I have this form. I have sensation. I seem to have a thinking mind.
Exactly. You derive your sense of existence through phenomena. And because phenomena changes, your sense of existence is always unstable and under threat.
Existence without phenomena
This is the most important question: is it possible for there to be something without phenomena, without phenomenological experience? For you to remain without experience, without body, without sensation, without thoughts.
Provided that the definition of "you" is beyond this skin, then probably yes. But if the definition of "me" is this person here, then probably not.
That's the important question: who are you, what are you? It comes down to what you're describing. At one point there are only two options. Either I am what is contained within this experience, so what I am depends on sensation, perception, body, or it doesn't. And that question can be answered not philosophically but experientially.
Can direct experience be self-deception?
I've heard the term "direct experience" very often, and I've gotten the impression that those who have experienced it directly know it without a doubt. But is it ever possible that it is actually a function of the mind that makes a person think they have had direct experience? Perhaps after being immersed in these ideas for so long? This is a question that arises from someone who does not have direct experience, which is why I'm asking.
So you're saying you seem to know that those who experience it directly don't have doubt, and you're wondering whether someone might internalize the knowledge so deeply that they essentially brainwash themselves into believing they've had direct experience?
Yes, that is exactly the question. I'm not doubting you at all. I'm just thinking analytically about what direct experience actually is, and whether it could ever be a phenomenon of the mind.
What you're really asking is: is it possible that we can fool ourselves? Yes, one hundred percent. That's what we're doing all the time. That's what this whole thing is about.
There are two ways you can diagnose that. One is: are you suffering? And if the answer is no, there's still a chance you're fooling yourself. In fact, the most common and deepest form of self-hypnosis is "I'm not suffering." The more awareness we have, the more we start to realize how deeply we are suffering. Then, through something that can be a process (or sometimes not a process at all), that suffering can end. But first it needs to become conscious.
So that's a way to know if we are fooling ourselves. If there is a sense of "I'm done, I have arrived," or "my life is fine," or "suffering happens to others," then we might be very asleep.
Conscious suffering
It is actually quite rare to consciously suffer. Often, even if we are aware that we're suffering, we are pushing it away, hiding it, projecting it, constantly moving it. And it comes to a point where none of that works. We start to see that all of our strategies to fix things don't work, because the source of that suffering has to do with something very deep. Wherever we go, whatever we do, however our life goes, if we're lucky, we see that none of it resolves this.
So I've had the wrong impression all along? I thought people who are more cultivated in the spiritual sense are more peaceful, less suffering. That is an illusion I've been holding for a long time.
If I generalize: as we begin spiritual work, we go deeper and deeper into suffering consciously. Then there will be awakening. Awakening will take us even deeper into suffering. And if the progression continues, there will be glimpses of what we were talking about earlier, emptiness. That's where the change happens. In the end, suffering is seen as illusory, as empty, but only through a deepening into the heart of it, into the core of it. It intensifies.
We can become better at managing it. Sometimes these changes are quite abrupt. There could be a very short period of time where the suffering intensifies and then there is a breakthrough. But in general, if this work progresses, in the beginning it gets harder. We start to deal more with pain and fear, more directly and deeply, and with the resistance toward them more directly and deeply. Over time, we become more comfortable with the fear and the pain. The resistance diminishes, and the suffering starts to alleviate.
Into it, not away from it
But from the very beginning of this work, the movement is not away from suffering. It is into it. Into the heart of it. The Buddha didn't sit under the tree from a place of instant bliss. He sought to face all of the distress. Jesus didn't go into the desert for forty days because he was blissing out. He went to sit with what was distressing him. Pure despair. These are extreme, intense stories, but you can generalize from them. For one person it might be lighter or faster, but the direction is definitely toward that which is difficult.
Once we taste that which we're running away from, and we learn that it is okay to taste it, then we don't need to run. We don't become free from it by running faster. We might feel like we are getting really good at it by managing all of our ways of escaping and avoiding.
Thinking that we're being skillful.
Exactly.
Shadow work and the core of illusion
Is what you've described what some would call shadow work?
Part of it is shadow work. Shadow work has to do with the human body-mind: past conditioning, trauma, karma. There are different systems for understanding it, Eastern and Western, but it concerns the human body-mind. And then there is the core of the mechanism of illusion, of confusion. The closer we get to it, the more distressing it can be. There are always fear and pain barriers.
Pain as in emotional pain, or physical pain?
For some it is physical, but I think that's more rare. For me it was especially physical, though not only physical. It's pain of all kinds. Pain is the sensation of something ending that we don't want to end.
Obviously there is physical pain, but even that loses its distressing quality when there is no fear of what is ending. It becomes just an uncomfortable, at times interesting, mysterious experience.
Pain without resistance
I can speak about this directly. I've had chronic pain for most of my life, all kinds of physical pain, and it was, to me, the cause of a lot of suffering. Then I realized it wasn't the cause. It was just where I was choosing to place the suffering. To know directly that the same pain can be present and no longer experienced in the same way, no longer with resistance or suffering: even the quality of distress that pain would bring just becomes a part of experience. And for me, luckily, it also diminished, because the dynamic of trying to resolve it would intensify it.